Through their ambition, backed by entrepreneurial acumen, both have demonstrated that caring for the environment can be good business

This is a tale of two entrepreneurs. Though they took different paths to get there, both of them have emerged as the most recognisable faces of entrepreneurship in the Indian renewable energy sector.

One is the son of India’s former finance minister; the other is the scion of a respected business group renowned for the motorcycles they make. One cut his teeth in the financial world as an investment banker in the US and UK; the other started his entrepreneurial career through a chain of payment collection centres in the pre-digital wallets era. One of them first thought about his present venture when he was the chief financial officer of another company; the other was passionate about his current line of work from his boarding school days.

Traversing on different paths, Sumant Sinha, chairman and chief executive officer of ReNew Power Ventures, and Rahul Munjal, chairman and managing director of Hero Future Energies (HFE), found common ground in their belief that doing well by the environment can also mean doing well by shareholders.

ReNew is India’s largest independent renewable power producer with an installed capacity of 2 GW (1 GW is equal to 1,000 MW) as on March 31 and Sinha says his company plans to add another 1 GW in 2017-18 across wind and solar power. It was the first independent power company in India to reach the 1 GW milestone, which it did in FY16.

Hero Future Energies is rapidly getting to where ReNew was a year ago. The power producer has a current installed capacity of over 500 MW. It is working towards getting to the 1 GW milestone by August; and by 2020, HFE intends to have a 2.5 GW capacity.

Sinha and Munjal, both based in the National Capital Region, exemplify the potential of India’s renewable energy sector that has allowed new entrepreneurs to dream big and create large-scale clean energy assets.